Kids are a nightmare. Not just for put-upon parents (although surely that), but also for web developers.

A tangled web of laws – as well as the fact that their target audience frequently can't really read – creates challenges which businesses working with adult audiences don't have to consider.

Under the BBC's Connected Studio scheme, which brings in external startups to develop ideas for new features and formats, two companies called Peekabu and Made By Pi have been tackling those challenges head on, although there is no set launch date for the two products.

The pilots, called Eezl and Predicto, are smart new ways to deal with kids as kids, rather than just settling for treating them as slightly dim miniature adults.

Kids forget passwords all the time

Think through all the competencies required to log in to a website. Not only do you have to be able to read and write – in an age of touchscreen computing, not at all something which can be assumed of everyone online – but you also usually need an email address, and frequently a Twitter or Facebook account as well. You must remember a password and type it with no visible feedback other than the number of characters written. And you have to keep that information secret, no matter how proud you are of it.

Given how many adults fail at those simple tasks, it's a bit much to expect it of the under-10s.

"Kids forget passwords all the time," says Alexander Cole, the chief executive of Edinburgh-based Peekabu. "They're often unfamiliar with the concept of logging in, there is often no username or social media account to remind them of their password when they forget it. And it's a real problem because the BBC's really keen to have children creating accounts, making friends with one another, and playing multiplayer games with their friends from the real world.

"How do you get kids to do this without forcing them down the same user journey path that everyone else has to do?"

Peekabu's pitch to Connected Studio was Eezl, a pilot idea solves the problem by throwing the normal route in the bin.

Logging in to Eezl Photograph: Screenshot

When registering an account using the service, presented as a mock-up of the CBBC website, children are asked to draw a picture and hold it up to their camera. The system recognises the drawing, and saves it in the database along with the child's preferred username. Logging in again is as simple as holding the picture up to the webcam.

As it is, Eezl still has some rough edges, particularly if the initial drawing doesn't have enough information to create a unique fingerprint (hence the text added to my self-portrait, above). But once registered, it works like a charm.

Password resets are handled using a similarly elegant process: "as part of the sign in process," Cole explains, "they register something that can't be lost: a page from their favourite book, or even the view from their window." Then, if the picture is destroyed, perhaps in an overzealous tidying session, a photo of the view outside lets a new drawing be registered.

The tech also has security benefits:

"The way making friends works right now is that I need to know your username and you need to know mine, but usernames are often very elaborate with lots of capital letters and difficult letters and numbers."

"To make friends with one another [using Eezl], all I need to do is scan your drawing, you scan my drawing, and we're friends."

The image recognition recognises such high levels of detail, Cole tells me, that "we've had children put one on top of the other and trace, we've had adults do this, and it still recognises them as different images. You could sign your name a hundred times and it would recognise each one as a different image. It's about as secure, equivalently, as a hundred character password."

Question and answer

Google knows everything about you, and yet its recommendations are far from perfect. (Who among us hasn't bought something online, only to be bombarded with adverts for that product? Does the biggest search engine in the world really think that beds are a thing people purchase in twos?)

Think how much harder that sort of recommendation is to make when you know barely anything about your target audience – and are largely banned by law from retaining what you do find out.

You could just ask them, of course. But even with adult attention spans, most people find filling in pages of demographic detail deathly dull. Children will be unlikely to make it past the splash screen.

Made By Pi still asks the questions, but makes them oblique enough that, it hopes, even kids as young as four will be able to make it through to the end.

Their pilot, Predicto, presents users with five questions, in an attempt to learn enough about them to offer up three pieces of content on the CBBC website that they will like. But rather than boring demographic data, the questions are intended to be – and largely actually are – fun. Delivered by Hacker T Dog, a brown furry puppet that I am reliably informed is much adored by the pre-teen demographic, they beg an answer.

Hacker makes a prediction in the Predicto Machino Photograph: /Made By Pi

The questions "I predict I could beat you in an arm wrestle"; "I predict you will like the fancy dress costume I have chosen for you"; "I predict you go everywhere in a stretch limousine" don't appear to be all that informative.

"They look almost meaningless, but the algorithms behind it do put some understanding under the logic of a yes or no answer," explains Made By Pi's Dominic Smith.

Because not every child answers the same way, the cleavages in their responses correlate well enough with other properties. Kids who like sport and outdoor activities may be more likely to claim victory in arm wrestling, while those who occupy themselves in their imagination or in stories may be optimistic about the chances that they'll like dressing up.

One of the advantages of the Connected Studio scheme is the resources smaller organisations can access from the BBC. For a project like Predicto, that means testing at a scale larger than would be otherwise be possible.

"When we did user testing with six to 12 year olds," Smith adds, "we found that Hacker's quite popular with kids of all ages, and they actually enjoyed answering the questions in itself. And it also did seem to send them to the right content.

"The ideal questions will find that a particular child is an eight-year-old boy who likes sports, doesn't like girls, likes playing outside and doesn't watch much telly, and tailor the content to that."

Whether it achieves its goal is harder to test than Eezl was. Even when I answer the questions truthfully, the content recommended at the end is not to my taste. Because I'm not a child.

But even if it doesn't live up to the ambitions, it's a fascinating gauntlet thrown down to the companies who want to collect and harvest every nugget of information. Doing more with less is an admirable goal.

If Eezl and Predicto are anything to go by, that's a lesson that the Connected Studio project itself has taken to heart. Seven more pilots have gone forward this season alone, each of them something the corporation would be proud to have turned out itself.